Watchmaker
by Disguise of Carnivorism
Summary: In a universe where Kira is no longer considered a man or a controversy, L's final heir seeks the means to end him. For surely there must be a world that is better without Kira in it. /AU/Post-Alternate Ending Death Note/
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: HELLO. This is a post-AU ending fic that is a semi-vague crossover with PK Dick-verse (specifically Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but with elements of other worlds). We own nothing. Even our socks are on loan.**

**If you read this first chapter in the vein of attempting to figure out one hundred percent of what's going on, you'll be left with gaping holes of confusion and distress. The style is fragmentary. It will come together piece by piece... Until then, enjoy the ride. :D**

**Please read and review-we do love feedback.**

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><p>She remembers the smell of ash in the cigarette tray and the brown hazy light. The light got brighter in waves as the cars passed by and the sirens wailed in the distance. Ash fell like snow through the blinds; dust floated like small flakes of heaven. Though, what she remembers is no longer certain. The memories, the dust and ash, is far from reality.<p>

Still, she remembers. She had been sitting in a chair, her hands laced on the table and her legs kicking back and forth. She hadn't been wearing any shoes, then—she usually didn't. Her hair had been pulled back because she was trying to do something important, though what she was supposed to learn from it, she wasn't sure. (She's sure now—the trick is the subtlety, knowing that she was only to guess, not to know. Every moment is just a turn in the game.)

The carpet had been full of grime. She imagined that at one point it had been red, but she couldn't quite tell. Its color gave way in streaks where her feet had passed, fading from the mangled aubergine-black into something slightly grayer, a star expanding and falling into itself, the black before the red. The carpet, she knows now, is not her colony's dying sun but rather the blood-red eye of Mars, the planet she had never (yes she had, her mind insisted) seen.

In front of her had been a picture of a man. The photograph was old, yellow around the edges, and the ink had faded until she could no longer see the color of his eyes. It was small, too, as if it had been taken only out of curiosity—a normal picture. But the man did not belong in his own picture. He looked back over his shoulder with a strange smile on his face, like he saw her watching him and was distantly amused that she would even perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the photograph was little more than a reflection, and his true face was hidden.

She remembers, on the side, that papers were also scattered about the table, but it was the photograph that was important. The photo took center stage.

"Who is he?" she asked, looking away from the man in the photograph up to the mentor on the other side of the table. She doesn't know where he came from, but there is ash on his collar. (A story's beginning, she was once told, is a happy accident. From nowhere to nowhere—the story writes itself.)

His reaction was slow. She watched her reflection in the thick lenses of his glasses—she was the pale girl with the yellow hair and the big blue eyes, her hands laced coolly in front of her, eye blinking while she waited. He was wearing a suit that day, as he did every day, and his wrinkles attempted to hide pride and pleasure but did not always succeed.

He did not smile, but then, she didn't expect him to. "This," he pointed to the photograph, finger covering the man's face, "is our greatest enemy."

His finger moved from the photograph. She looked at his face again, looked at her mirror in the glasses: in the glasses there was only her face, only herself.

"His name is Light Yagami. We know him as Kira," the mentor continued, bringing his hands together before him. The dusty light caught in his glasses until, like the photograph, she could no longer make out the color of his eyes.

"How do we know?" she asked, looking back up to him. This time the man did smile. Her curved reflection didn't smile in return.

"Because he always fits, though he has hidden that fact very deeply. We have little in the form of evidence, of DNA, or even of theories. What facts and data we may have had have been lost in one fire or another. What we do have is intuition, deep in our hearts, even when there's nothing in our minds. We look at this man and we know that he is Kira, and no one else."

"But Kira is over three hundred years old. It couldn't have been a single person," she said, and the words seemed to echo against the ticking of the clock.

The mentor opened a file that also rested on the desk and brought out three other photographs, these much more recent. The man was the same. Still he looked at the camera with that strange smile, the same smile—as if he knew what the photographer was thinking, had known before the thoughts had even taken form. She had thought then that perhaps he knew what she was thinking. (She still had that feeling, the feeling that he wasn't looking at the photographer, but rather that he was looking at her.)

"Kira has many gifts, some of which are known, many of which are merely guessed. This photograph is old, but there are others." The mentor paused, and his eyes flicked up to hers. "This man is very old and very dangerous."

Her legs stopped moving. Her eyes caught on one of the more recent photographs; he was walking, his hair a strange auburn color and his eyes golden. He was looking over his shoulder and carrying a leather briefcase in his right hand, but she could tell that he wasn't really looking—he was seeing, and he was smiling.

"He's the reason we're on the colonies, isn't he?"

The man nodded. "One of them. We were once on Earth, but we found that we were too easily destroyed when we were in his eyesight. The opposition to Kira has grown slim. Now, more than ever, we must take care when we approach him."

She didn't say anything then because she felt as if there was something she was missing, some important point, just out of her grasp, that she dare not whisper in case the man in the photographs heard.

"We are the last of the organized resistance against Kira. People have stopped trying to find Kira and to see him as fallible, even as human. To these people, Kira is an immutable fact, a force of the universe—like gravity, like the tides and the pull of the moon. Nothing more. Only to us, his forgotten enemies, is his face even distinguishable from the face of this reality. This means that we are the only ones left who can stop him. This… is why you are here, and why I am here: because surely there must be a world that is better without Kira in it."

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><p>She is sitting across from him in the wooden chair but she is not looking at him. She is looking at the walls. There are pictures everywhere, hastily drawn—sketches of people, places, things, memories, moments, emotions. Pictures are everywhere and everything. They smell like smoke.<p>

Her eyes lock on one in particular. It is a dilapidated house; the roof is falling in and the glass in the windows are broken. A gothic L was painted on its side in curved, dripping ink. It is brown and brown again as if it is the only color that it knows—walls, stairs, window frames and door, everything brown. There is no grass outside. The dirt is red, the pavement is dark, and the sun is like a vulture in the sky. It is painted in watercolors, and yet its reality was once so very vibrant.

The walls are full of pictures; the pictures are full of moments and words that are left unsaid and unspoken. The walls are things that are left forgotten because they have too many words.

She doesn't say anything, but then she turns to him. This time he is not smiling. He looks different when he doesn't smile. She doesn't want to find any more scattered pictures in her mind.

"My name," he says slowly, "is Light Yagami."

She says nothing because her eyes have found another face on the wall. She doesn't want to see this face any longer because she knows it too well, so she looks away again. There are too many pictures.

"You know who I am," she says finally, her eyes flicking back to him. He is smiling slightly, this time—not the challenging smile she normally saw, but something that almost pitied. He, too, is sitting, but he sits in a creaking couch and every time he shifts it groans with age (and he seems larger than her, larger than the room).

"Yes, I know who you are and I know what you are."

She closes her eyes so that she can't see the walls, the screaming, deafening walls that have always been there in her head pounding in her head. The memories are the photographs and they smell like smoke and fire. The memories are the walls in Kira's house. They are covered in pictures, stained in watercolor, and they mean nothing.

"It's your fault, isn't it?" she says with her eyes closed, throwing out the pictures, tearing them down from the walls because they aren't real, they aren't real, the pictures aren't real.

"Yes," he says lightly and the words echo in the emptiness. "Don't mistake me for someone else, though. These pictures are only yours."

"None of it was real." She opens her eyes and stared into his face, seeing only another watercolor painting. The pictures are the memories are lies.

"There were grains of reality. I took pieces, ideas, from my own world and put them in yours." He motions to the walls. She can not look because she knows what she will see there—her life painted on his walls in watercolor.

"My mother died when I was eight. There was an accident. I saw it happen, there was blood everywhere, and I didn't know what was happening. There were sirens all around and lots of men were talking—they looked at me but they were so big I couldn't see their eyes. She wouldn't wake up, she didn't even look, she…" She stops talking, trying not to look at the walls and see her mother's crushed features staring back at her (because they must be there, somewhere, sketched by his thin, pale fingers). She notices that her breathing is ragged and that talking has become difficult. "Did I not understand because I was little or because you thought that I would think I didn't understand? Can a replicant understand what it means to lose something you love, or did you just think that it would be best to avoid that issue altogether?"

Somewhere in the room a clock is ticking. The papers rustle in her mind and drop off the walls one by one. She can only watch—the tears blur the watercolor until it is only a shade and the pictures mean nothing. They are no longer real.

There is only Kira and Light Yagami left, sitting across from her with dragon's eyes.

"No one you knew ever existed—no one you loved, hated, cared for in any way, except for me. I am the only thing in your memories that is real. There are stories of other men like me, men from earth, men who think they are God. They give life but they can't give meaning—meaning is far different from life. Eventually their creations find them. They ask why, and these men don't have an answer. The maker always dies."

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><p>Sitting in a hotel room, she looked at the photographs. There were fifteen in total. She flipped through them carefully, ignoring the streaks of light that fell through her blinds. The sirens were racing past and the sun had already set. She was not sure what they were chasing, but then, she had never known what made the sirens give chase. It seemed almost random—when they came rushing past and when they stayed silent, who she would find bleeding in the street and who would remain living. Their screeching, wailing discourse faded into the night. She spared a brief glance through the blinds where she found the streetlights, like captured stars, watching her.<p>

The photographs helped her think and remember. The photographs in themselves were little more than useless: his face rarely changed, and he was never in focus. Most of them were aged and yellow and smelled like smoke. But the photographs, she thought, are memories. (Memories more real and solid than her own.)

She closed her eyes but she could still see his half-hidden face; she smiled because that was good. She didn't need the photographs—she knew his face. He was like a ghost. He was always there behind the curtains and the backdrop. He was there in the beginning. She would be there at the end.

The bags were packed. The plans were set. Soon she would move.

This world was a lonely place, a forgotten star filled with too much hope and too little past. It had too many streetlights and houses and land, but that was nothing in the face of the infinite darkness. The sky was black with space. The stars seemed so small and so dim. They would scarcely notice her passage because they were so distant and so fragile—they may already have died, and she would never know.

One day (a day already past) they would burn out (burned out) and she would not know for a thousand years.

Perhaps, it would be the same with Kira.

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><p>There were replicants everywhere on the colonies. She'd watch them from inside the brown house with the boarded windows. Her toes would curl beneath her feet and she'd watch as they walked down the street trying to tell which was which. She gave them names when they passed under the strips of light in the boards.<p>

Joseph walked as if a shadow was chasing him, making his way to the mines, his hair and face streaked black. There was nothingness on his face. That's how replicants looked, the new ones—their faces were blank puzzles. Later, they would change: Maria was an older replicant, so she walked slowly and her eyes flashed when she looked at the buildings. Her face was careful, but it was blank; her eyes blazed like streetlamps and her soul wailed in the darkness. Maria was very old, Maria didn't have that much longer to live, Maria's birthday cake had five candles. It would only ever have six—the Makers made them only ever have six. Bad things happened when a replicant lived too long. There was a rumor that they had a nasty tendency to turn into humans.

The mentor never looked at them very long before looking away. His eyes from behind the glasses would stare and stare, but most days he wouldn't say anything. He did say something once, though. They were outside of the house, her feet bare, his feet in brown leather. A man was walking past, but he was screaming and bleeding—he had been shot. No one moved. She watched him with wide blue eyes, but when he looked at her there was nothing but agony.

"What's wrong with him?" she asked the mentor.

"He's a replicant." The mentor took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief in his pocket. "He must have become tired of not being human."

The people standing outside the buildings stared and stared. He fell on the ground and started to crawl. No one moved. She saw her mother there—but there had been people with her mother; there had been wailing and screaming and blood and agony. There was only nothingness on this street.

"Why did they shoot him? Did he do something wrong?" she asked.

"Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to tell. He could have run away from the mines, tried to get off planet, maybe. Or maybe he killed someone. For a replicant, those things are the same. There's no difference between murder and escape. They live in a different world from ours. I don't think even Kira knows quite what to do with them."

The dying man stopped moving and the sun watched him, watched and watched him, and never blinked. The sun never seemed to blink on those days. His shirt was stained red—she didn't know what color it was before the blood. He didn't even have a name, just a red shirt.

"Kira?"

The mentor did not smile but looked down. In that moment he was all in shadow and she could not see his face. "Helen, have you noticed that even when a replicant kills a human, or when a human kills a replicant, neither of them die?"

His voice didn't sound like his voice then, not the voice she had known, but like someone else's, someone's voice that she had heard before but that she couldn't remember. A passing voice—a dark, passing voice whistling in the night.

The replicant died. She moved the body out from the street under the eyes of the noon day sun. His hands were cold and she dragged him slowly. His shoes scraped against the pavement and she couldn't help but think that they were the mentor's size, or close, and that she shouldn't waste something as precious as leather.

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><p>She remembers saying words, useless, angry (no, not angry, she was never capable of anger, not even then) words. She was alone then; there was no one to hear them, but they meant just as much as they would have anywhere else.<p>

"I need to find him."

There was crumpled paper in her hands. She had torn it from a black notebook on the desk. It crinkled and shifted in her hands, imploding.

"This has to stop. He needs to be stopped. No one else, no one else can do it—I'm the only one. All the rest are dead; I'm the only one left. It has to stop."

She dropped the paper on the ground and stood, not looking as it unfurled itself like a flower. She remembers her eyes drifting to the window even as she walked out of the room, out onto the street, beyond the street.

There were no thoughts, no stars—just the words ringing like crystal bells in her ears.

This has to stop.


	2. Chapter 2

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><p>Memory tells her that the earth was little more than a pale blue dot hanging in the sky. Mars had no great cities, not like the earth. Mars was mountains and deserts and frozen oceans. Mars was the wild red desert that people had forgotten. Those who came from Earth said that there was nothing in the sky anymore; there were no stars, only a dark purple haze. The pollution and the lights had drowned out the sky, or so they said. Perhaps it was only rationalization to justify their decision to leave that doomed dot in the sky.<p>

The little girl in the memoriesdidn't particularly care. For her Earth was only a little blue dot in the sky, almost indistinguishable amid the mass of light. The fact that it glowed a bit brighter was all that made it special. It was different for others.

Earth was a symbol, an idea. It was the origin. It was the place where humanity had begun, the place they had lost. And with it they had lost some integral part of themselves. Helen had never felt that. To her, Earth's only significance was that it was the place Kira resided, and it was the place she must return if she were ever to find him. (It is a backdrop and nothing more significant than that—it is the paintings on the walls. She knows this now.)

Leaving Mars should have been harder than it was.

There should have been some moment of doubt, maybe regret, where she looked back and saw her red mountains, saw that they meant more than that pale blue dot. There wasn't.

It only took a few packed bags, not even a shuttle ticket—she stayed in the cargo hold.

She imagined that if she looked out the window and watched, the red mountain—her red mountains—would disappear into the fumes and the great shrinking red canvas. There were no windows in the cargo hold. Only dull silver lining and packed bags. She took in her surroundings, her eyes roaming over the labels and the latches that held the bags in place. It creaked and groaned and hummed.

She wondered what it would be like if she had bought a ticket instead. She had her reasons, though, or so she had told herself, sitting there as her muscles began to cramp. She had very little money, firstly. And she would need it once she got there. Buying a ticket was expensive and silly. Why bother? Kira, too—who knew whether or not he would check who bought tickets and who came back? They registered and searched those who left, checking for replicants among them. Replicants were no longer legal on Earth; too many nasty accidents. The colonies were a bit broader minded.

She remembers that when the ship's great shaking subsided, she stood and began to walk around. That was when she saw them, the other stowaways.

It's said that you can't recognize a replicant when it looks at you. That it looks and acts exactly as if it were a person. That's why they have to test—because they can't tell the difference anymore. It isn't true. She could see a replicant in a single glance. They looked as if they were trying too hard or too little, and when they looked at her there was nothing in their eyes. People looked for something in the body, something glaringly obvious. It wasn't that tangible. It was the abstract, the everything: the way they held themselves, their too-reflective eyes, and their frightened, tense faces.

There were four of them. She stood over the group and catalogued each of them in turn. One girl, a pleasure model, red curling hair and dark green eyes batting—her eyelashes were too long. The three others, all men, all mine-workers. Fingers too long and too thin, dirt beneath their eyes, black in their hair, grim faces that had seen too few sunsets and yet had none left. One of the men looked back at her and attempted a smile. It didn't reach his eyes.

Six years already. She guessed (she knew).

People were never meant to be fatalistic. Replicants had their lifespans stamped on their hands: six years, six years only. Too many problems, too many things gone wrong and parts fallen apart, and there was no fixing it. Helen knew they were fighting a doomed battle. They knew, too. They were travelling back to Earth to search for a holy grail, and there were sure to be casualties, but they wouldn't find it. The grail didn't exist. The great gods (the great scientists) didn't intend for there to be an antidote.

She held out her hand. "My name is Helen."

They simply watched her, the man still smiling, the others still blinking. Finally, the man took her hand. She noticed that his hair wasn't black but a light brown; he hadn't washed out the soot.

"I'm Erza," he said dimly. It was the first time, she reflected, that she had actually heard a replicant speak. She had always known they were capable of speech, but nevertheless, she couldn't help but feel unnerved, hearing words from that almost human mouth.

Helen took her seat and looked at each of them in turn again. The wrinkles at the corners of their eyes didn't look despairing—yet there was no hope in them either. She turned back to the leader.

"Do you think you'll find an extension?" she asked. They each looked at her in turn; the woman's eyes grew in a pale shade of fear, but Erza was smiling still.

Usually it was the fifth year when they began to break down. There was something about looking in the mirror and counting and realizing that the numbers were getting too large. Much too large. Too little time left to lose. Fifth year in the mines, fifth year in the desert sun, plowing the fields, fifth year of living without a name… In her head there is a shoeless corpse being dragged to the side of the road. (She wonders if the mentor's body still wears the dead man's shoes.)

"What are you looking for?" Erza asked with that half-tilted smile. She frowned at it because replicants didn't smile, couldn't smile for nothing. He knows something, she found herself thinking; he looks too familiar. Even in the soot and the streaks of darkness, she knew that smile from somewhere.

(She wasn't sure then where the thought appeared, but as she looked at him, she felt that he stole that smile because it didn't fit; it didn't even try to look real. It looked too familiar. But that didn't matter—he was only a replicant, anyway. That smile had been manufactured onto the faces of thousands of others.)

"A man that people forgot about," Helen said, ignoring her thoughts and looking away from his face. "We call him Kira now."

The replicants looked at one another and then looked back at her. "We've heard of your Kira," Erza said after a long silence (too long glances).

"He's not my Kira," she snapped, and the words began to echo**. **The rusted cavern of the ship curved in on itself and the words seemed neverending, neverdisappearing…

(Why, she thinks, does that comment seem so out of place, so rushed and emotional in the humming thrumming cargo hold? What makes that comment so glaring, so sharp, in the empty space?)

"He does not belong to us. Kira does not kill for replicants or against replicants. He avoids us." Erza smiled. "He would kill for you and against you. He belongs to you."

In her bag there were photographs. She would not look at them, but that smile that she had seen before—he wore it too. Over his shoulder, in the shadow, Light Yagami smiled.

The silver shuddered beneath her shoes, her dead leather shoes. She thought suddenly of the desert and the red sand that she would never see again.

"I don't believe in him or what he does," she said thinly, and it was as if they were no longer there and she was looking at the mentor again, the mentor who never smiled except those few times when he did. They no longer mattered; they were shadows on the wall, flecks of painted rust.

"I will stop him."

The shadows spoke in one voice. The voice of the ship and the replicants became one mechanical thrum in the night: "He believes in you, Helen."

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><p>There is a notebook on his desk. This, she thinks, is different, one detail that wasn't hiding in her false memories. She has never seen this particular notebook before. Its black cover is decorated with faded golden writing; she can't make out the words. She imagines they aren't important. She just likes to look at something that isn't him, isn't the walls, isn't the falseness and the lack of existence.<p>

"Reality isn't as wonderful as you think," the man called Light comments drily. He deserves a name, at least, she thinks. No, not quite—he doesn't deserve to be Light, but he doesn't deserve to be the god-like (invisible) figure that he's turned himself into. She wants something human (real) to curse, not some distant Jehovah looking down from some silver-lined cloud.

Helen laughs at this, and says shortly, "How would you know? You've never had anything else."

Something she said makes him smile. His hand takes the notebook from the desk and holds it up to the light. Again, his face proves more malleable in person; he looks far grimmer and perhaps a little older, though his face seems to defy age.

"I barely remember being human. It was so long ago…" He looks at her, away from the black leather in his hand. "At first I thought I just lost them because they didn't interest me. Perhaps it was nothing more than that. The older I become, the more ages I see pass, the less I think this."

He sets down the notebook and brushes it away from him, further onto the desk. Her eyes follow it. Dust floats from the pages and she can make out letters, letters that remind her of the desert and its crumbling ruins.

"It took my childhood. I remember nothing of my time without it. Everything fades, Helen, everything is painted in watercolors." He pauses and takes a breath, looking at his own pictures, taking them each in turn. "Perhaps, like you, I am little more than an idle whim. Perhaps I am something the Notebook created out of boredom. The difference is that it didn't even bother with false memories—it just gave me assumptions. Or perhaps it just took something away. I'll never really know."

Kira draws his hands together and bows his head before looking up again. "_That_ is reality. All the reality I've known for over three hundred years. My reality is hardly less of a lie than yours."

"So it was you, this whole time. You never died." She smiles. "Were you disappointed?"

He does laugh at that. It seems wrong. Again wrong, as if it doesn't belong. He looks at her and his smile touches his eyes briefly. "No one has ever asked me so bluntly before," he explains before looking away and sighing.

"I don't know if I was disappointed. It's not something you realize for a very long time, you see. It builds up in moments. There were moments, definite moments, where I should have died. They passed me by one by one, until one morning I found myself standing at my sister's funeral as if nothing had changed."

He motions to Helen, motions to her torn ragged clothing and her narrowed blue eyes. "You didn't realize the nature of your past right away. It wasn't a single moment. It was a multitude of moments that didn't fit: contradictions. The mentor showed you pictures of me yet you don't remember where he came from: he was simply there, and had always been there. There were flaws and you knew it. You knew each and every one of them, but you had to let them stack against one another until you could no longer walk over them."

She doesn't want him saying it; she doesn't want him even thinking it. She doesn't care if it was true. He has no right to think her own thoughts. He has no right inside her head, though he has invited himself in so easily. He doesn't belong there. (He created it.)

"Immortality isn't something that came naturally to me. It wasn't intuitive. But everyone kept changing, and I remained and have remained the same. One morning I woke up, after everyone I knew had died. I was turning one hundred. There was no one left who knew my name, and I knew that I would never die. Everything was covered in dust, the window was open and it was snowing outside. I could hear the people laughing in the streets, but the sound didn't reach me. I knew that I had lost something essential to my humanity, something small and bright, and that I would never find it again.

"I was no longer a man but a god. I have been a god ever since."

Helen interrupts. "You aren't a god."

Why does he always smile when she speaks?

"Matter of opinion, Helen. What would you call me?"

"A sham."

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><p>She had once wandered into the desert so that she could see the stars more clearly. She had left her shoes with the mentor and had said nothing. She didn't know why she started walking or when her feet first stepped onto the barren plain, but she walked long after the sun had set in the horizon. She hadn't been wearing shoes, and by the time she returned, her feet were bleeding. The mentor said nothing even then; he had already been waiting with the bandages.<p>

There were very few plants in the red desert. Mars was still the unconquered alien eye, red, like the fire and the blood. The desert was more ice than sand and the mountains ascended into the howling winds where the gods screamed at each other. The heat was in the scattered cities, the brave colonies in their brave new world, but the desert was old and it was cold. The red sand breathed mist and in its heart the fire burned.

Her mother had said that she was a colony child because she hadn't seen the pale blue dot in person, and in a way this was right. She belonged to the desert, and she crossed it with bleeding, calloused feet.

She saw the night, the stars, the earth, the moons, the mountains, the valleys, the great read tundra, and she saw the colonies when she rose above the mountains, scattered stars on the red earth.

Earth was alien. Earth wasn't Mars. Earth was loud.

The replicants had seen the pale blue dot in person. They had been created there before they had been bought and sold and scattered. Earth was a dying place. Earth was a sick old man whose days were numbered—too much cancer (radiation they said), tuberculosis (lungs filled), leukemia. Earth had caught up with its own diseases in the end. They had only seen the innards though, the factories, the blank white spaces where they checked your eyes before they declared you as goods.

Earth was cities, stagnation, desperation, feeble hands, and feeble feet.

When she stepped off the shuttle bags in hand running into the dark, over the fence, through the alleys the ground was smooth beneath shattered glass. Paved and repaved and then broken. People swarmed. Through hooded eyes, they watched her pass, bumping her with hunched shoulders and looking away again. They were locusts, a swarm; there were too many faces, so many faces. (Now she remembers that the people all had the same faces; it was hard to tell them apart.)

(She thinks even now that she has never seen so many faces, so many faces that were the same, and she thinks that this moment might be the shift. He says that there is a theory that God made the world five minutes ago and that they could never tell for all the evidence has just been created and is very convincing.

She disagrees. There is a shift. She can see it, she can feel it. Somewhere in that mob, among those faces, in those alleys when she shifted in and out of sight, somewhere, her eyes opened and she became as she is instead of what she wasn't.)

The alleys dripped and shifted beneath her feet. There was only walking in this city, no running or wandering; there was only walking and bumping and stumbling along. She held tightly to her bags and watched the strangers' faces for a sign—of theft or familiarity, she wasn't certain.

But she ignored the sights—because Earth was only the backdrop and the truth would be found in Kira. (His subtlety knows no bounds: only he could make her think that she had no other choice when she had all the choices in the world.)

Eventually she found herself in a library, though it was difficult to tell which building was which when they all scraped against the dark sky. Here, there was less noise and less drowned light. Computer screens glowed (no, not glowed—that was too soft a word for the stabbing light). She approached them slowly.

In the next step forward she forgot the street, the replicants, the desert, because the computer was what mattered (it never mattered). Her goal was the man hidden in the world, not the world itself**.** The world faded and the computer screen glowed; her fingers typed, and she was home.

(Whatever, wherever, whenever home is. Her maker has never specified and she has never bothered to ask.)

* * *

><p>The mentor's family did not visit often. They did not particularly like him, nor he, them. They had come to the colony whole, but then split apart. Or so the story went. She supposes now that it was in fact much simpler than that: there had never been a mentor nor a mentor's family, and they had never split because they had never existed outside of her own head.<p>

She does not remember how old she was supposed to be when they visited (she often doesn't remember the age; it always seemed to tedious to keep track of, as if even then she had known it wasn't important). She knows only that she was old enough to look the mentor in the face and see the grimace had grown deeper.

They did not announce; they said they had and that the mentor had lost the mail. Perhaps he had, perhaps he hadn't. It didn't matter. They were uninvited all the same.

The mentor was smaller than his brother, leaner, more fragile. His brother laughed and smiled and waved his hand and brushed the mentor to the side—he didn't even know his own brother's name.

"Hey there!" he said, grinning. He motioned for his family to follow him to the brown house (her brown house, not theirs, never theirs, how dare they enter…). A woman and a boy followed in tow; the boy was only a bit taller than her, and had a crooked smile (off center) and dark hair that was too long for his face.

The mentor had been watering the few plants in the yard; most of his face was shrouded in a black scarf, and when he looked up one could only see his expression through his glasses. She had been sitting beside him, watching with her head in her hands. She lowered her hands and looked at the family instead.

"It's been too long. You never write." The brother laughed and reached forward, bringing the mentor into an awkward hug.

Somehow even then, as she watched all the discomfort and the things unspoken, she knew it wasn't real. It was a show put on for her benefit, a charade, a very clever one but a charade none the less. All the bright colors and mystery were only distractions from the fact the backdrop was only painted behind them. It was a sham.

"Sorry, it's good to see you." The mentor said looking at the ground. "Thank you for coming. I know it's a long journey."

"Yes well one of us has to visit." The man said again his voice and laughter tense. He meant something else.

"Who's the girl? Don't tell me she's…"

"Oh no, this is Helen my adopted daughter."

There was a cold silence and Helen looked the man in the eye. Too much emotion, too much written in plain sight. He and his family, they were too presentable and believable. Too well developed in a single moment, hook line and sinker, she didn't believe in a single one of them. He was regarding her, watching the way she watched him with those too blue eyes. He frowned.

"Hell, you aren't good with kids."

The mentor shrugged. The mentor never could answer things like that. He could only say important things, Helen-things, Kira-things, he wasn't made to answer the mundane things of reality. He didn't belong to reality anyway, she misses him, though she knows that in some way he will always be there.

(She remembers watching him die, cancer, several years later. Holding his hand, it was so cold, so different from the accident. It was the first time she could see his face, and he looked so thin, he looked so dead already. He had even smiled at her. She knows now that he never died, she never held his hand, and that he exists as he always had. He is as alive as he has always been. Which means nothing and everything. There should be no grief for things that have never been, but there is.)

The brother was there again (he had disappeared in her distraction: faded back into dust and clockwork) and his family had reappeared with him; the boy was looking at her, too, that crooked smile grown more crooked as if he knew.

"Don't tell me this is about Kira."

It was, everything was. Even the brother himself was about Kira, though he didn't know it.

The brother looked as if he had more to say in the silence, but the mentor was already moving back into the house with the family. Helen stayed behind, watching how the sunset painted them red like the replicant on the pavement. Yet there was no one there to steal their shoes and drag them off the path. They were nameless, shades in khaki pants, walking into a water-colored house.

The memories are only the pictures on the walls: they lack both significance and meaning. Yet, these red shadows mean more to her than this fading world of men.


	3. Chapter 3

Kira had changed from those old days. She had not been around in his beginning but she could sense this change, this loss, everywhere. Kira had once been a misguided man, a controversy, something that could be (had to be) stopped. They couldn't. They tried and failed one at a time until they were only graves. He outlasted them, outlived them, and that was all. Then no one had disagreed anymore, and the world began to move on.

She imagined, as she walked through the crowded Earth cities to the trains that would lead her to Tokyo, that the old world was much different. Kira was a force of nature now, nothing more. There was nothing to argue with, nothing to debate. If you murdered and you were found, you would die. If you raped, you would die. So it was written. For three hundred years it had been written.

There were physics equations based upon him, formulas, rules that predicted his movements. There was nothing to talk about: no fear, only knowledge.

Helen believed that there was a world beyond the fear of powers beyond their control. There was an attainable world in which Kira was not God.

She watched the lights twinkle like stars in the sky beyond the train window, her head leaning against the glass. The cities were ghosts, flickering by as she rushed above the water. Out of sight and out of mind, they faded into nothingness. She imagined instead of seeing cities, they were memories—brief moments of illumination caught in her mind. Her mother dying, the red desert, the replicants, the visitors… All attacked her like lightning and then faded behind her, into the abyss, as she drew closer to the man who became God.

It is only now that she knows why she thought that, and understands what programs and manipulations placed the ideas in her head; at the time, it was only a thought.

There were temples dedicated to his name. They prayed that Kira would strike down their enemies and deliver unto them the kingdom of heaven. They didn't expect him to answer. She had entered one of these temples before leaving for the trains. It was alive with candles and holy light; the windows were made of brightly-colored glass. Above the altar there was a picture of a bearded man with a sword in his hand. Fire descended from heaven at his command, and the sinners beneath him pleaded. It wasn't a picture of Light Yagami, quiet, dangerous Light Yagami, smiling over his shoulder and playing his dangerous game. It looked so wrong, so horribly wrong.

She had stood there, staring at it. There must have been something in her eye, some horrified sense of recognition, because she found a girl in white next to her, staring up at the picture as well.

"The artist took creative license from the Sistine Chapel," the girl explained, brushing auburn hair behind her ear. "It is what we imagine to be Kira's first appearance after he made the decision to manifest, though we know that realistically he was unseen at the time."

"Then you have never spoken with him," Helen said, turning her eyes to look at the girl next to her, who looked unshaken in her faith, as if she had never doubted for a moment of her life. Yet, Helen knew that beneath her robes she knew nothing of Kira.

The girl shook her head and smiled. "Some say that Kira spoke to humans in the earlier years—three hundred years ago, we think—but he has brought forth no prophets since."

Prophets. There was something in that word, and in the way it was used so reverently, that made her shudder. The candles flickered and the wax dripped in beads of white. Helen turned back to the picture of that noble, vengeful God.

She asked another question, then. "What do you think he'll do about the replicants?"

The girl in white seemed as if she had never even entertained the thought that replicants might be relevant to anything, and looked confused. "What do you mean?"

"He hasn't made a decision about the replicants yet. He ignores them. I don't think he can decide if they're human or not. What do you think he'll do?"

The girl in white looked at Helen then, truly looked, and shook her head, her mouth pursing. "Kira is ineffable and omniscient. He made all decisions long before we could even ask the questions. We simply cannot comprehend them."

On the train as Helen thought back to this girl in white, this deluded worshipper who did not even realize the nature of her god. She pitied her. If Helen succeeded, she would kill this girl's God as if he were nothing. He was no more real to them than he was to her. They didn't believe in Light Yagami, either.

The cities scattered in the distance behind her, their light stolen by the darkness, until all she could see was the water rushing behind.

* * *

><p>"Kira's a phenomena, certainly not a person." The mentor's brother gave a short chuckle as if he found any other idea to be ridiculous.<p>

They were sitting at the table in the room with the red carpet. It was the place for all meetings of importance. Helen sat at the table; her feet made streaks of scarlet in the carpet and she stared listlessly at the dust kicked up by her movements. The others sat as well, looking at the brother as if they had heard this all before and were quite irritated by its recurrence. The boy tapped his fingers on the table, his eyes glancing at Helen every once in a while.

"Honestly, it's sickening that you persist in this belief… and then you tell it to children. You should be imprisoned for this." There was something in the way he lit his cigarette—a casual defiance and condemnation of everything his brother had ever believed—in that reminded Helen of watching replicants get shot in the streets.

The mentor's brother's attention wandered to Helen. He stuck a finger at her and said through smoke and cigarette, "You better watch out, little girl. He'll stuff all his fantasies in your head until all you'll be thinking is 'death to Kira'!"

He laughed again, as if he had said the greatest thing ever to be said. The smoke poured out of his mouth until she couldn't make out his face. He had become a dragon, and with him he brought all the fantasy and illusion that belonged to a dragon's cave. (There was none of the treasure.)

His wife spoke, then. "Tell me, how did you get involved in this Kira business anyway?" she asked the mentor, who looked up at her through thick lenses.

The brother answered for him. This farce wasn't the mentor's place, not his purpose. He was there for Helen, not for his own estranged family. Kira has made that clear through the fine-tuned placement of the mentor throughout the memories.

"Ach, our crazy grandfather got him hooked when he was too young to know any better. Said that Kira was really a man, just some kid with a magic object he found. The kid decided to start killing off psychos, and so he started. There was a police investigation and everything, but they never found him. And so we just wrote him off as being a god." He offered his audience a lazy smile, more an entertainer than a man "Frankly, our grandfather was so drunk that half the time, he thought that he was Kira."

"So, wait a minute. If Kira's just some guy, then how's he been around so long?" the son asked.

The brother seemed to be darkening with each mention of Kira. His cigarette grew shorter with each breath and his eyes glowed like embers. Helen watched him and noticed how unreal he seemed, how fake, how different from the other real things in her world. She guesses now that Light put a little less effort into the mentor's brother than he did the mentor.

"That's the real kicker," the brother laughed. "Kira's magical object, it made him immortal. Yup. Cancer, radiation poisoning—all we need to avoid it is Kira's handy dandy mass murder bobble."

The table grew silent. At the time, Helen had thought of her own mother—who had died so suddenly, who had not been as lucky as Kira. She had the feeling that she was missing the point. They were all missing the point, somehow.

"How did your grandfather know?" Helen asked. She felt as if a spotlight had been dropped on her. Until that moment she had not existed for them, even the mentor; she had been the wallpaper, and she had been the table, but not anything real and breathing.

The brother scratched his head awkwardly, smiling. "He made the shit up, but he said that he had connections back to this orphanage. He said that the orphanage had a couple of really smart kids who tried to stop Kira, but that it didn't work out too good for them. Don't take it too seriously though, Heather—he was a terrible excuse for a relative."

The irony, Helen feels, is entirely intentional. Even Light Yagami has a sense of humor.

"Helen," she corrected him, glancing at the mentor. He sat motionless, staring at the grains of wood in the table as if they held all the answers for him. He looked like a doll, then, cast aside and forgotten, not real when he wasn't speaking.

"Hmmmm?" the brother said as he lit a new cigarette, the old having served its purpose, ground into dust in the ash tray. She watched the smoke drift upward, still breathing, from its remains. Like a line of paint it flowed skyward, almost transparent, and she felt that it was more important than anything in her life had ever been.

Another cigarette took its place and the moment was gone. Memories are a funny thing, she thinks.

"My name is Helen," she said, looking firmly at the family who was staring at her, not sure quite what to make of her but looking at her all the same.

"So, Helen, when did he pick you up?" the boy asked with a cheeky smile, nodding his head at his uncle, who had said nothing the whole time—like he wasn't even there.

Something about the way he said it, "picked up", made her think of a black notebook falling from the sky. Something that brought misfortune. At the time, she shook her head and smiled at the thought, wondering where on earth it came from.

(It was not from earth, her earth, any earth. He took elements of his own world, his own reality, and put them into hers… So saith the maker.)

"I was eight when my mother died. There was an accident," she, said looking at him while seeing in her mind her mother's discarded body. "I never really had a father. They couldn't find him, at any rate. I went to a foster home for a little while; a couple months later I was adopted and I've been here ever since."

(Funny that even then, even in that moment, she did not know his real name. Light hadn't even given her a name to call him by, and it hadn't made a difference.)

The boy smiled as if she had something particularly funny. She really hated him in that moment, hated all of them. They were so false, so different from her; they were human and she was not. Even then, even when she believed the memories on the walls, there had been something lacking. In the distance she could hear the sirens again, and she distantly wondered what poor replicant they were chasing down that night.

The sirens, she has decided, were Light Yagami's little reminder to Helen. Just another of his little mind games that he had given her to keep her busy during the long dark nights when the smoke seemed brighter than the stars.

The brother's family laughed amid the smoke and Helen couldn't see a thing.

* * *

><p>"A sham?" he asks. "Well, that certainly is an interesting way to put it, even if I don't agree with you." He looks nostalgic, and something about that makes her sick.<p>

So, she thinks, this is my maker.

"You're not God," she says. "I don't know what you are, but you're not God."

She holds his eyes and realizes that he is the most real thing she has ever seen in her life. He has been there in her memories, a vision, a dream, but he is here as well. He has transcended that abyss in her head into the true world. All else is an illusion he has created, a game they have been playing, a test. Only now does she find herself staring reality in the face.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

"I am not the God you are thinking of; although I do resemble him." When he says this she can't help but think of that painting in the church and how it didn't resemble him at all. "I am a great, ineffable power. I have grown distant to the point where I can do nothing and everything to these people. I fix only what needs fixing, like a watchmaker; I don't meddle where I'm not needed."

Her eyes flash to his desk, to his walls, to all the tools he's used to create fantasy and illusion. She knows her expression has grown darker; his face doesn't change at all.

"Is that how you justify yourself?" she asks. "You could just stop. The watch was there without you; it'll run without you."

He looks at her and she knows that without words he has just said no. For a moment she sees past his mask of the maker; she sees a desperate old man sitting alone in his room, tinkering with things beyond his control.

"No, it won't," he assures her, as if it is the simplest, most natural statement in the world and should be perfectly compatible with her reality. "The watch adjusted itself to me. If I left now, it would be a disaster. I thought of that too; I even tried it, once…" He trails off, staring inward at his own workings. He holds out his hands as if there is supposed to be some magic trick there, but they remain empty. There is no magic.

"So even the great Kira doesn't believe in himself," Helen says for him. Somehow she has become his prophet. She is the only one that truly sees in his mind; all others who claim that title are liars, lunatics, and frauds.

"At the time it seemed like a good idea." He looks up at the ceiling, at the dim lighting in his lonely apartment. A ceiling fan whirs above them and she can't help but notice that while the furniture is sparse and dull, the instruments that litter his apartment (taking up all table space) are a bright silver that look both alien and ancient. Half hidden in a closet she sees a skeletal frame, almost human, shining in the half-light. It's more than the walls, she thinks; his home is full of bones and half-made corpses.

She sinks further into her chair, away from the realization that there is more to this room than the walls filled with her, only her. There are other things that encompass this graveyard, and it terrifies her. For she is certain that if she were to get up from her seat and to search the apartment, she would find other blank not-real not-human (her) faces staring with the glazed eyes of fish and open lips, as if they had paused mid-breath to remember that they had never learned to breathe at all. And he would let her, she knows now—he would let her search and find them, and oh God, look at their faces and see them staring at her (when there's nothing there, nothing there at all).

"I don't regret my decisions. I merely wonder at them sometimes." He looks at her then tenderly, as if she is his daughter or perhaps his younger sister; he looks at her with more love and hope in his eyes than she has ever seen from anyone before.

She's not sure what to think of that, and she thinks this shows on her face. Her eyes flick to the notebook on the desk. (There are bloodless bodies stashed in his closet and in his workroom with half-finished hands and toes; there are tools like needles that stare at her with silver glints in their eyes...)

"But Helen, we're not here to talk about me," he says casually, standing from his chair and making his way to the cold coffee he had left on his desk to drown in a sea of papers. Before he turns, his eyes meet hers. She understands that he knows every thought that has passed through her head, and understands that the words he says are not words at all. It's a distraction, it's an escape—temporary, but real, so that she doesn't have to look. By giving him the go-ahead she is allowing him to read from a script so that she doesn't have to look, so that she doesn't have to see.

(She isn't real, he isn't real, the room isn't real, the memories are on the walls, the bodies are in the closet...)

"What are we talking about, then?" she asks genuinely—because as far as she has been told, they have been discussing nothing and everything that needs to be discussed.

"We're talking about you," he says as he casually looks away, grabbing the coffee from the desk (it has been sitting atop a pile of blue prints, next to the fine tuned silver needles, so it must be cold; she wonders if he even tastes it or if it is only a show for her benefit.)

"You know everything about me already. You made me," she accuses, to which he nods again—as if this act of God is nothing new or significant to him. Creation is just another field day for the great Kira.

"As much as I appreciate that blatant fuel source for my god-complex, that point is rather irrelevant. I do not know you: I know your possibilities, what you have the potential to do. There is no set universe, Helen. All those programs inside your head could amount to anything. Just because I happened to put them there, happen to be the God you accuse me of being and not being, doesn't mean I have the faintest idea of what you're going to say or do. Only guesses."

"So even my maker doesn't know who I am," she says quietly, trying not to think of what that implies, how alone that makes her, and how desperately alone it makes the both of them. He doesn't answer. She supposes that he doesn't need to—the answer is that he still knows her better than anyone else knows her.

He puts down the coffee and looks at her, his eyes darker than they were before, more detached. He is thinking, calculating, planning, estimating, listing off the possibilities one by one in his head. She remembers the mentor saying that Light Yagami was a very old and very dangerous man.

"What on earth is there to talk about?" she asks dryly. "I'm nothing. I'm less of a person than you are. I'm just something you made up."

"You haven't asked me why," he states as he watches her—states, not says, as if it is a fact that needs to be declared rather than something that is being asked for. Once again she is reminded that he is not what she ever expected, ever hoped for, because she can't describe his arrogance. She had expected a lunatic sitting on a throne in his basement with servants, but she finds an old man (in the costume of youth) who lives by himself in an apartment where there is no light. His assurance is not in his tone of voice, which is soft, but in his eyes when he speaks. When he talks and looks at her, she can see that he expects a certain answer and will receive it, has already lived this moment in his mind a thousand times before; he has memorized his own script. This man has outlived empires.

"Why does there have to be a reason?" she asks, a smile on her lips. "Why couldn't it just be the game of a sick man living by himself, whiling away the time?"

"There is a reason," he says again with that calm assurance that clashes with her own jumbled fragmented state of mind. "There are things in this world that I do not understand. I need help."

It is harder to summon anger than she thought it would be; just as terror is often repressed, it is a slowburning furnace in her head. It stares out of her eyes at a man who is immovable as the red mountains in her mind. She wonders if this too was written, scripted in some program on his desktop in the late hours of the night.

"You made me your enemy, your last enemy, in my memories. Why would I ever help you?" she asks.

"Because anyone who claims to be my ally suffers from insanity and lives in a fractured, fragmented reality of my own creation. Only my enemies could possibly be sane enough to see the way things truly are," he says as if he believes this is obvious and hardly worth mentioning.

"I thought you were God. Doesn't God have all the answers?"

His seriousness is broken and he grins like a child. "This God thing is a very sore subject with you."

"You didn't answer my question," she says, pinning him down, strapping him to a table with a knife in her hand, cutting him open while he's still breathing, still looking; she wants him to bleed, thinks of him dying under some man's gun as he should have died when it all began. She likes him better that way. (Like her, like the toys he engineers for the rich and for the corporations, like all those fools he's manipulated with paper and pen...)

"Even God plays with dice, sometimes."

* * *

><p>There were people everywhere in Tokyo. Too many people. The desert had been empty, the sky had been bright, the ground had been red. There were people yet there were no people; all the people she had known, truly known, were gone, lost in one accident or another.<p>

She only had the photographs.

They didn't look at her as she passed by, so she looked around her at the captured lights, captured stars, and up at the dark, smog-colored sky. She carried her bag under her arm and looked up constantly, looking for the sign.

Kira was careless in his old age. Perhaps he wanted to be found.

All it had taken was a typed name. He had hardly touched it, hardly altered it in any way or form, and his name had glared at her over the internet like a declaration of war, a challenge painted in hundreds of years of deaths. Hikaru Yagami: Light Yagami...

There had been a flash of terror when she had seen his photograph for the company (he was a biogenetic engineer for a Japanese branch of the leading builder of replicants). That he was real, still alive—she hadn't truly believed it. He wasn't smiling; it was the first time she had seen him without that challenging smirk, and he looked old and alone. He looked at the camera with blank, ancient eyes that spoke of a time before gods and men. He looked so small and so very old, and with horrified recognition, her hands had shaken and she had known that he was real. All the nightmares, the legends, the deaths were real. This man had murdered thousands.

She searched through his history on the website. He was apparently an accomplished engineer, having designed the overall nervous system of the Nexus 6 generation of replicants. The company website listed him as thirty-five years old and employed for fifteen years. Soon, she knew, if she didn't find him, Hikaru Yagami would die in some fateful accident or kidnapping; another Light Yagami (perhaps Kouki Yagami) would be born and appear out of nothingness with a false I.D. and a birth certificate.

No one would look, no one would think—he was just some poor intelligent street-rat with one of those familiar faces.

So no one would look, no one would see, and no one would realize that he had been dead for hundreds of years. They would only see his photo in the company registry and think, how strange to have such a young face and eyes that are so terribly old.

Perhaps, Helen thought, as she had stared at that new photo, perhaps the only reason she needed to kill this man was simply that he had lived too long.


End file.
